


A year without dying

by praycambrian



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Aging, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Mortality, Post-Canon, Recovery, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 22:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30062331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/praycambrian/pseuds/praycambrian
Summary: One morning, I went to the laundry room and you were waiting for me there. You, my own, my other limb: the face I know best of all time’s many faces.After a mission gone wrong sidelines her at Nile’s family farm, Andy resigns herself to healing at the apparently glacial pace of a normal human being. Then Quỳnh shows up: gorgeous, immortal, inscrutable.A road trip isn’t going to solve all of their problems, but Andy’s willing to give it a try.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 8
Kudos: 24
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	A year without dying

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings for some canon-typical violence, depression, suicidal thoughts, and one description of animal death. 
> 
> This story also includes background Joe/Nicky and past Andy/Achilles, though they’re not prominent enough to tag.
> 
> Many enormous thanks to dylogger ([tumblr](https://dylogger.tumblr.com/) | [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DYlogger/pseuds/DYlogger)) for her spectacular art! I’m so thrilled by what she came up with.Check out more about the art and her process [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/30026481).
> 
> Written for [the Old Guard Big Bang](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/oldguardbigbang).

In youth I knew nothing of the taste of sorrow  
I liked to climb high towers,  
I liked to climb high towers  
To conjure up a bit of sorrow to make new verse. 

Now I know only too well the taste of sorrow.   
I begin to speak yet pause,  
I begin to speak yet pause  
And say instead, “My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

—[ Xin Qiji ](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Xin-Qiji) (1140-1207), translated by [ Eileen Chengyin Chow](https://twitter.com/chowleen/status/1176289102293098498)

i held you in my arms  
a thousand years ago  
now you hold me…

don’t you understand?  
we shall die and meet

again, and say goodbye  
again, and teach each other 

the same gentleness  
again and again. 

—[ Joseph Pintauro ](https://www.brainpickings.org/tag/joseph-pintauro/) (1930-2018), from _One Circus, Three Rings, Forever and Ever, Hooray!_

* * *

It was a stupid mistake. A tripwire in a door. If Nile had gone first she would’ve caught the blast in the chest, shook it off, and kept going. But she didn’t go first. 

I had enough time to cover my face as I went flying backward over the balustrade and then I was on the floor in the lobby, vision swimming and ears ringing, so that it seemed like the dawn was falling in pale shards through the skylight to hit the floor around me like bells. 

Nile and Joe got us out. Nicky found the doctor. I was mostly out of it for that part. Wish I’d been fully out. I was only lucid enough to stare at the worn tapestry tacked up across the doctor’s back room and think, with dull relief, _at least it’s over._ And then I remembered you, remembered that you were alive, somewhere. I had a vague idea you’d be pissed if I died like that, from a dumbass fall in some country you wouldn’t recognize. I am to die by your hand and no other’s: that’s always been true, despite everything else. 

So I let them help me, when all I wanted was to sleep.

Almost a week spent in that haze. Then the careful parade onto the jet Copley’d wrangled with what was left of the liquid we took from Merrick. I slept most of that flight, too, not even sure where we were going. The one time I woke, Nicky was dozing at my hip, all the shades down but for a fingernail of blazing light left at the far end of the cabin for Joe, who hated flying. I spent half a minute listening for Book’s snores before I remembered. 

Nile was watching me.

“Asshole,” she whispered venomously.

Took me a few swallows to scrape up my voice. “Told you. I always go first.”

“Don’t know how many ways I can say it, your death wish ain’t sexy.”

“If it’s my time—”

“But it’s not,” Nile said. “Andy. You know I don’t beg, but I am begging you. Listen to me.”

I looked away. Even as small as it was, that little slice of light reached all the way back to us: it made faint shadows stand out in the molded plastic of the ceiling, like some faraway terrain. Joe always kept the window open for the view. He said usually it was beautiful enough to make him forget his fear. Or, not forget—understand, maybe. Justify.

“I hear you,” I said quietly. 

Nile sat back, rubbed her face. She looked exhausted. Her braids needed to come out; dried blood crusted her scalp between them.

“They still think you’re invincible,” she said. “They’ve forgotten what it’s like when your body hurts, and keeps hurting. I’m starting to forget, too. That’s what worries me. If I’m not thinking about you being breakable, then who is? Because it sure ain’t you.”

“Excuse me, _breakable?_ ”

“Andy, you literally broke half the bones in your body.”

I gave a little experimental wiggle and stopped immediately. It felt like I was made of a bunch of glass shards lying under a silk cloth: everything was fine, unless you put the slightest pressure on the cloth. “You got me on the good drugs, huh.”

“Nicky knows what he’s doing.”

Nile sat up, pulling the blanket higher over me where it had fallen loose. She smoothed my hair out of my face.

“The mission?” I said.

“Copley’s on it. We’ll finish it once you’re safe.” 

“What about—”

“Andromache,” she said. “You’ve done enough. It’s time to rest.” 

I closed my eyes. The low hum of the plane engines, the low thump of my own pulse in my ears. Nile doesn’t remind me of you, not really, except when she does. 

After what felt like a long time, I nodded. 

Nile slumped in relief. “You’re staying with my mom. She moved out of the city, gave Jordan the house; she’s out in the country now, no one around. You can ease up. Take your time. Take care of yourself for once.”

The skin of my cheek felt cool where Nile’s hand had been.

“All right,” I said. 

*

A car was waiting at the airport: more atonement from Copley. Nile drove. Joe picked the music, some woman's voice low and vaguely familiar. Nicky coaxed me to lean against him in the back seat to save my ribs the ordeal of being upright. 

The full of summer. Dozing green blur of trees past the window. 

“I have something to tell you,” Nicky murmured.

“What?” 

“I called Booker.” 

When could he have? A flutter of memory: Nicky crouched on a stool in the doctor’s back room, cheap phone cupped in his broad hand. Flipped closed. He must have just hung up. His blank face softening as he saw me wake; he’d tilted his head, whispered _welcome back, boss._

“That’s why you were the one to stay with me,” I said. “You didn’t want to make Joe make that call.”

“It would have been cruel,” he agreed. “I would not ask Joe to gently break the news of your death to the person he holds responsible. I ask too much of him already.”

“Never too much,” Joe said from the front. 

“Even so.”

“Booker didn’t kill me,” I said.

“Only by the grace of God,” Joe said.

“We’re not going down that road,” I said. “This point is, I didn’t fucking die.” 

“It was very close, Andy,” Nicky said. 

His arm was already wrapped around me; he grasped my hand lightly.

We rode for a while in a quiet only broken by Joe’s music. I tried, as unsuccessfully as I ever had, to contain my irritation at my family’s belief in a god that was younger than I was. I thought of Booker instead, pickling his liver alone in some Parisian flat.

“What did he say?” I asked. 

Nicky shrugged. Gently, so as not to jar me. “ _Je suis désolé, désolé, désolé._ What more could he say? He asked to see you. I told him to ask you if you lived. He sounded quite drunk. He didn’t cry.”

“You miss him.”

“Yes,” Nicky said calmly. Joe looked at us in the rearview; he and Nicky passed some glance between them before Joe looked away. 

“Where are we going?” I said. 

“Family farm,” Nile said. “I spent summers there as a kid. My great-uncles kept it when my great-grandad moved to Chicago in the twenties. Two hundred acres of soybeans.”

“Admirable,” said Nicky, kind Nicky, who wouldn’t know an acre if it kicked him in the ass. 

Nile turned off the highway. “It used to be bigger,” she said.

*

We were in Virginia, as it turned out. I hadn’t recognized it. I’d only been there a few times, in the 1650s and the 1860s; I was used to seeing it with more gunfire. And anyway I knew it better from Achilles’s stories, where memory made it glow and twist the way no land ever did in life. When Achilles was a young man he’d given twice as much voice to what he’d hated as to what he’d loved; when he got a little older he spent more time on love. But the whole time Virginia was on his tongue, the fulcrum of his whole self. 

I wanted to tell Nile I’d changed my mind. I didn’t want to be here. In the end it hardly mattered, though; I’d have ghosts anywhere. 

We stopped a few minutes away to let Joe take the driver's seat so Nile could hop out, sneak through the woods, slip into the farmhouse from the back to avoid being seen by the cousins who thought she’d been KIA for years. It was the compromise we’d come to, near the beginning, not long after Merrick: Nile’s mother and brother could know, but no further. Our secret put Nile’s sprawling, beloved family at risk from people like Merrick as much as from the hatred that had ruined Booker’s sons. The knowing of us had to be contained, like a virus. 

Joe drove carefully up the long dirt lane, eggshell-gentle over the potholes. Lucretia Freeman rose from her rocker and welcomed us into her house like old friends. 

There was lemonade ready, and fresh biscuits. Joe raised an eyebrow, grinning.

“What?” Lucretia said, catching his look. “I had all morning, waiting for y’all to show up. Had to have something to do. They turn out okay?”

“They are wonderful,” Nicky said sincerely. 

“You should take that compliment seriously, coming from him,” Joe said. “His cooking has made kings weep.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Only one king,” Nicky corrected.

They settled me on the living room couch under a window with lace-trimmed curtains. Lucretia could’ve been a hearth-god of Lykon’s time, so powerful was her hospitality. It felt like a clear warmth was radiating off of every object in the room. 

“Nile?” Lucretia asked.

Joe smiled. “Waiting upstairs. We figured discretion was key.”

“She told you about nosey old cousin Huey, huh.” 

“She spoke with great affection,” Nicky said diplomatically. Behind him, Joe mouthed _yes_ , nodding. 

“You better put her out of her misery,” I told Lucretia. “You two, go on, get on the road. Give the Freemans a minute.”

Joe tilted his head. Nicky gave me that remote look he has sometimes, eyes flat and bright as an animal in the dark. 

“Okay, boss,” Joe said gently. He had to kneel to embrace me. “We’ll see you soon. Remember, it can’t be worse than Crimea. Nothing—”

“—can be worse than Crimea,” I finished in unison. “I know.”

“If we did not have those loose ends still to tie up, we would stay with you,” Nicky said. “But it is not finished yet, not all of it, and we don’t want anyone coming after you here.”

“I know,” I said again. I wanted them to leave if they were leaving. We’d parted a thousand times, sometimes for years on end, and I’d never thought much of it, but this was different. I felt something like thistles in my throat. 

One after the other they pressed their foreheads to mine and then kissed me there. They solemnly accepted well-wishes from Lucretia. Then they got in the car and left. 

Lucretia had only met me once before, but it must have been enough for her, because she didn’t say anything about me pushing my family out of the door. Normally I could outlast silence like a champ; it was one of my favorite hobbies. But this one just kept swelling past what I could bear.

“Nile’s upstairs,” I reminded Lucretia. 

She was smoothing the quilt over me, like her daughter had done for me just hours before. I wanted her to know that, but I didn’t want to tell her. Sunlight came through her glasses and left bright squares on her cheeks. 

“I hated you at first,” she said. 

“I know.” Lo, Andronika the all-knowing. My whole body was killing me. “If it’s any consolation, I did too.”

“It’s not.” Somehow her grip had moved from the quilt to my hands. “I didn’t blame you for it happening, oh no; not even you can stop God doing what he’s going to do.” I didn’t roll my eyes, mostly because I was too tired to. “I blamed you for telling her to cut us loose. I thought, how many thousand years this woman been alive and that’s the best advice she’s got to give? What a crying shame. And then it turned into the saddest thing I ever heard. No,” she said, “I don’t hate you anymore.” 

My throat closed. This is why I don’t like people: when they see my weakness, they don’t have the animal sense to stay away; they reach out and touch, over and over, nevermind that they come away just fine when I’m left pitted and worn like one of those pilgrimage rocks. 

I jerked my chin up: _Nile’s waiting._ Lucretia, thank a thousand spirits of mercy, stood and climbed the stairs without another word.

A stuttering floorboard creak. The warm low rush of their voices, mother and child. I couldn’t make out the words— _I love you, I’ve missed you_ —but I laid my head back and looked at the plaster ceiling, imagining anyway. 

*

The healing was intolerable. 

It took two months to be able to stand and walk for minutes at a time, to hold things in either hand without shaking or pain flaring pink in my joints. At Lucretia’s unyielding insistence, I helped make dinner a few days a week. Collard greens, burgers, cornbread. After that it was the garden. An hour spread out over a full day, then an hour at a time, then two. Insomniac nights sinking myself into the constant indigo chirring of frogs and crickets, hoping they could grind my senses into nothing. Lucretia, who woke at a pindrop, kept a nightlight in the hall. One night I watched a moth with folded brown wings climb calmly into the scalloped glass: a vigil that once it ended felt like it had spanned a decade. 

I pulled silver hairs from the honeycomb tiles in the shower. I helped feed the chickens with hands that ached. Huey, who lived across the field and kept the farm, introduced me to other farmers as someone who used to serve with his cousin Nile. _Used to._ I couldn’t even correct him; it was the truth. At the beginning of August we found one of the dogs dismantled on the side of the valley road, where the farm’s long dirt lane met patched asphalt. A notorious rabbit-chaser, she’d been young, a bit silly, used to the farm and little else: no car sense. Her dark organs stank and steamed as the skin failed to grow back over them. And I, who had let slip more gore in my life than a dust-speck like Huey could ever dream, turned aside and gagged bile into the wildflowers. 

Everyone handled me with a kind of unfussy, muscular kindness. No wonder: they were Nile’s people. 

All the mothering Lucretia couldn’t give her own daughter she hung on me instead, an absurdity like arranging a rusted knife on the same shelf as the heirloom china. When I stood transfixed by the way a scab on my wrist puckered the skin around it, Lucretia drew me into some task or another that necessitated the telling of a story about Nile or Jordan, about her grandfather, about the South Side: the nights the Sox played, the noise of the L, the way you could smell the ice off the lake. She’d left the city to spend her golden years in the family farmhouse, in greenness and clean air and real quiet. 

“I miss it, but it’s changed so much I never want to see it again,” Lu said. “I bet you know what that’s like, don’t you.” 

I did know. Sometimes, with the younger ones—Lykon especially, and Nile—I’d been able, for a little while, to see the world as new as they saw it: a pearl slick with wonder to the touch. It was harder now I was dying. All I saw was ghosts, even here in America: ghosts thick as dirt. Without the work, without anything to do but sit and feel my body painfully reforming, I couldn’t help but imagine myself among them. 

Seven thousand years and I’d seen no reason to think the dead go anywhere but into the dust of the universe. But if I was wrong… if I was wrong, then there was no one left alive who could give me the death rites, no one waiting on the other side of the grave to bring me into the Black Fields among my people. I’d be no more than an exile, a smear of smoke lingering between worlds, wholly alone.

I hoped for dust. 

*

Joe called about a month in.

“It’s done, boss,” he said. I could hear street noise behind him, foot traffic, hawkers in a market. Any one of a thousand cities. 

“Good,” I said after a moment. 

“That’s it? You don’t want to know any more?”

“If you say it’s done, it’s done.”

“Fair enough.” A pause. “You doing okay, Andy?” 

“I spent forty minutes in the garden yesterday and had to sleep for two hours.”

“So you’re recovering,” Joe said calmly. “That’s fine. Besides, you’ve always slept like that.” 

“I’m tired, Joe.” 

A little clink: a teacup on tile, maybe. I imagined his warm, lively face. “We can come get you,” he said. “You can be tired anywhere you want. Izmir. Baku. Esmeraldas. Somewhere on the water. You can sleep all day and Nicky will bring you baklava whenever you wake.” A warm murmur in the background. “He promises.”

I hated being on the Freemans’ farm. I hated feeling stifled, stiff, resentful, while these generous no-longer-strangers went about their slow, moth-flare lives. I thought of recovering with my family, in safety. I thought of looking for you. 

“No,” I said. 

“Not yet,” Joe said. “Okay, not yet. I hear you. Why?” 

I had an idea why: it hovered just outside my vision, a veil of bright dust I kept glancing away from. If I left it’d come with me, if I stayed I’d look it in the face eventually, and so I remained frozen like a rabbit in the middle. I didn’t want Joe to know this.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He hummed. He’d been eager to bring me home, because he had a home anywhere, if we were all with him. So certain. So young still. I missed him ferociously. 

“Okay, Andy. Whatever you need. It’s all right.”

“Joe,” I said, beginning to take it back, to change my mind, but he reassured me again—it’s all right—and I closed my eyes and put my head down and let it go. 

* 

One morning, I went to the laundry room and you were waiting for me there. 

You, my own, my other limb: the face I know best of all time’s many faces. Your red shirt, your long sleek hair shining, your ready hands. You sat atop the washer. Seven hells, you took my breath away. It felt like another fall had punched my voice out of me.

“Quỳnh,” I said softly. 

You made a face. “Andromache.”

I had so much to say to you, I couldn’t say anything. I put down my basket. 

“Will you just keep staring at me like a calf?”

I almost smiled, though my face felt loose as icemelt. “Can you blame me?”

As soon as I said it I knew it was a misstep. You didn’t answer; it could have been a kindness, but I wasn’t sure. You slid off the washer, graceful as a snake. 

“It was easy to find Booker,” you said. “This is a very small world now, isn’t it? I only had to walk through Paris for a few days before I saw something I recognized from his dreams. He told me everything I asked about you, except for where you were. He wanted to protect you from me.”

“I know,” I said. “As soon as you left, he called me.”

“Very loyal.”

“You caught him on a good day, then.” 

“No,” you said, delicately. “He is loyal to you, even when he hates you. For a little while, at least. Just wait and see. His exile is only beginning.”

“Quỳnh,” I said. “I’m sorry. You know I—”

You splayed your hand at eye level, so you could look at the bright tips of your fingers instead of at me. “He said you searched a hundred years before you allowed yourself to hope I had died. He said that when he joined you and Yusuf and Niccolò, when he dreamed of me and you learned I lived, you searched again.”

“I couldn’t find you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It was very dark. You could have missed me by inches and never known. Perhaps you did.” You lowered your hand. “I meant not to think about it. I meant to come here and mock you for being such a poor hunter and yet such easy prey.”

“I haven’t been hiding from you.”

“You haven’t been waiting, either. It took nearly dying for you to stay in one place long enough for me to reach you.”

I have always known when to strike. Always, always. “I’ve been here for months,” I said. “Why did you wait so long to come to me?”

If the hit landed I couldn’t tell from your face, your bearing. You used to whine and moan at the slightest injury; now it seemed pain might go into you and just not come back out. 

“Quỳnh,” I said, “was Booker right in wanting to protect me from you?”

You rolled your eyes, nudged the basket with your foot. “I am not going to kill you. Then who would do the laundry?”

I felt all my tiredness catch up to me at once. 

“How did you escape?” I said.

“I had a minute or two between each death. I found the hinges and hammered them until they broke.”

“Hammered,” I whispered.

“With my fingertips.”

I felt numb, empty. I had to steady myself on the basket of laundry. Lucretia’s nubby linens bunched under my fingers. 

“Well,” you said. “Don’t let me stop you.”

It would’ve gone quicker with two people, but you just watched as I worked. The dryer had broken for good weeks before and this time not even Huey’s machine canniness could keep it going, so we’d strung up the lines between the side of the house and the walnut tree and started putting a bit of vinegar in the wash to keep the clothes from drying stiff. Old white bedsheets billowed between us like sails. I only saw your face in flashes. 

Afterwards I stood there with the empty basket. I hadn’t known your language when we first met, either, three thousand years ago in a different world; and yet I’d never found it so hard to talk to you. 

You held up your hand as a sheet nudged into it like a horse hunting sugar, and then the breeze fell away and the sheet fell with it. “Ask me to stay and eat,” you said, almost pitying. 

“Stay to eat,” I said. 

“How accommodating you’ve grown.”

“I’m still in shock. You’ll have your contrary motherfucker back in a minute.”

“Oh, I do hope so,” you said. Tilted your head, bright-eyed. Gestured for me to lead the way inside. “Just don’t make me wait.”

*

Lucretia sliced honey ham for sandwiches with a long, shining knife. I didn’t think of the roadkill dog, I didn’t think of Lykon’s slit belly; I looked at your bright clothes armoring you like a queen and wondered where you’d found them. Your danger felt magnified indoors, in the kitchen: a viper rising from a bowl of milk. 

Sandwiches, fruit salad, chips, sweet tea. You tasted enough of the plate to know the thing you liked best, and then you ate around it, mannered and calm, saving it for last. But it was easy to see you were hungry. 

“What,” Lucretia laughed, “did you walk all the way here?”

“Just from New York,” you answered.

Lucretia blinked. “New York _City?”_

“That is where my ship came in.”

“Well, how long did that take?”

“A fortnight, more or less.”

Lucretia stared a moment longer, then laughed. 

“Good Lord.”

You shrugged. “I’ve walked the length of the world ten times over.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but usually we had horses.”

I was trying, unsuccessfully, to get you to look at me.

“Thank you for the meal,” you told Lucretia politely, in crisp and brittle English.

“My pleasure, honey,” said Lucretia, meaning it. She was unhappy with me and hiding it well. Your eyes never left her.

“What has Andromache told you of me?” you asked. “I fear I’ve made you nervous.”

“Not nervous. Worried,” Lucretia said. “I know enough to know it’s a hard time for both of you to be sitting here like this. I’m a mother, I’ve got to worry.”

“I was a mother too, did you know that?” you said. “I had two sons.” You said their names: gold syllables sinuous as fish in a current. “Lykon left behind daughters, as did Yusuf. Niccoló only went to God once his wife and child had died. And Booker, of course, had his infamous sons. Andromache is the only one of us who never had children; the warriors of her people were not permitted, you see. I sometimes think that is why she doesn’t understand.”

“Understand what?” I said with an edge to my voice. 

“You’re forgetting Nile,” Lucretia said. “She doesn’t have kids either.”

“I am, am I not. I promise I won’t forget her again.” 

“I’m sure you won’t,” Lucretia said calmly. “You got a place to stay tonight?”

You met her gaze across the tabletop. I felt like the audience in a play: the reason you were performing in the first place, and yet immaterial to whatever you were saying to each other. 

“I wouldn’t want to trouble you,” you said. 

“I got no trouble here,” Lu said, “this is my home. Andy’s too, as good as. So if you want to be welcome, you’re welcome. You want to heal, heal here. Anything else, that’s for—” she waved at the window— “another world. Wherever you came from. Whatever limbo you all live in outside the rest of us.” 

You were silent. I don’t think you’d expected Lucretia to be like she is: kind, unyielding, honest. That wearing-away touch again. I felt for you. All this time my ties to Lu, to Huey, to Huey’s family and the farmers and the neighbors and fuck, even the dogs—all these mortals—those ties had been tugging on me like weights waiting for the string to snap. If I could hardly stand it, how much less could you?

“Stay the night,” I said softly. Finally you looked at me—for a moment, and then you looked away. You pressed a finger into the condensation on your glass as if it was wax. 

“Very well,” you said. 

*

There was a game of washers after supper. Outside the yellow well of the porchlight, fireflies pierced the evening. Huey won, as Huey usually did. I was watching you the whole time without letting on, and even so I missed the moment you slipped away. 

I found you in the bedroom, running your hand over the quilt Lucretia’s grandmother had made, which had traveled to Chicago and back again over the course of generations while you drowned at the bottom of the Atlantic. 

Did you know about the war—any of them? The slaveries, the rebellions, the twisting sneer of empires changing their shapes over and over. Did you know what that quilt meant any more than I did? The delicacy of your touch made me think you might. I was sorry to think of you learning anything about the past centuries while you were alone, and relieved to think there were some things maybe I wouldn’t have to tell you. 

“You wouldn’t believe the nightmares I’ve had in here,” I said. I toed off my boots, gestured at the window and the headboard and the old vanity, as if the dreams would rise up at the smallest invocation. “Pain medication is something else these days. I dream I’m just—falling forever. Or not able to move.”

“How terrible for you.”

“Yeah.” I came closer. It was a small room. Only the bed lay between us. “How terrible when it isn’t a dream.”

I reached out, slow enough you could stop me—you could’ve stopped me however fast I moved, but I wanted you to be able to do it without reflex, without violence. My hand cupped your warm, warm cheek. 

“Quỳnh,” I said. Just to say it. 

You closed your eyes. You leaned away. 

*

I slept light, but not light enough for you. When I came awake just before dawn you were gone, the sheets cool, the pillow with the faintest stain of perfume from your hair. You were gone again: it felt like another nightmare. 

You weren’t in the house or the garden. There were shapes moving in the mist across the field: Huey and the girls, starting their chores. 

I started calling for you. “Quỳnh! Quỳnh, you sow-faced spawn of a demon! Where the fuck are you!” 

No answer from the cluster of peach trees, from the mock oranges lining the road. I slid down the bank of the creek and there you were, sitting on a flat rock in the middle of the clear water with one of Lucretia’s plates in your hand. You watched me with your eyebrows raised.

“Yes, Andromache?”

“I couldn’t find you,” I said stupidly.

“But you just did.” 

Your mocking was as grating as it was reassuring. It had never worried me before to wake alone; you’d always been quicker to rise than me. Lykon used to tease I slept like his grandmothers: poorly and greedily. 

“Hungry?” I said, nodding at the plate. 

“Not anymore.” 

The light was still changing, turning the creek’s steady waters into a ripple of pink glass. Time slipped underneath me. We could have been anywhere, in any year, meeting each other’s eyes for the first time after yet another death that didn’t stick. 

“What now, Quỳnh?” I said. 

You rose gracefully and step-stoned across the creek, one hand out for balance, the other holding the plate and knife. 

“Walk with me,” you said. 

“Let me leave a note for Lucretia.”

You set the dishes in the mud and turned upstream. “Do as you please.”

I rinsed your dishes with the garden hose and left them in the kitchen sink, my heart thumping. _Gone for a walk with Q,_ I wrote Lu. _Don’t know when we’ll be back. Don’t worry._

By the time I caught up with you, you’d left the Freeman farm entirely, walking along a drainage ditch paralleling the road. You had a bag on one shoulder and a handful of weeds you were stripping of their leaves, methodically, without looking. 

“Where are we going?” I said. 

“Does it matter?” 

“I guess not.” 

I did my best to keep pace. I started regretting my skipped breakfast, the cup of coffee I hadn’t drunk. Cars hummed by. Grasshoppers droned. After awhile you broke away from the road to hike the slope of a foothill, through long grasses, over a cattle grate, up into the trees. My legs burned. From the top of the ridge the valley fell away behind us, gold and indistinct; before us the foothills wrinkled up and up into mountains, scraped bare here and there for powerlines. I sat slowly, sweat-soft, my whole body lit up with fiery little pains, and watched you watch the distance. I waited for whatever it was you’d needed to cover such a distance to say. 

“Do you consider this beautiful?” you asked me, gesturing. 

I looked at the view again. “Worse than others. Better than some.”

“When I finally made it to shore, I had to keep my eyes on the sand because the sky was so bright as to blind me, after centuries in the black,” you said. “Even the gentlest blue was like knives. Do you want to know the worst part?” 

“I want you to tell me.” 

“The worst part wasn’t dying over and over, or knowing that I was alone, that you’d left me. It was that I couldn’t move. And then, when I finally could—”

We’d spoken English for Lucretia’s sake, but alone we spoke old Cham, the way we had all through that first desert, through the thousand years before Lykon and the thousand years after. The word you used for _move_ meant to move one’s own body, to stretch or breathe. It also meant to imagine: to move one’s thoughts into the future, to place yourself in the next week or day or hour. 

I said nothing. I’d been buried alive, more than once, but that was nothing. You passed me a canteen. I drank in small sips, careful not to hurt myself.

“We should head back,” I said eventually. We’d walked half the day; we’d be lucky to get home before dusk, slow as I was now.

“No,” you said. 

“No?”

“No.”

Well, then. At least I was already wearing my good walking boots. I thought of Lucretia waiting later that night on the front porch, the light on, Huey pacing in the yard. 

“All right,” I said. “Where are we going?”

You turned away, but not fast enough to hide your face. I saw that you had no idea where to go. I hadn’t been able to give you mercy since 1568, so I pulled myself up and started walking west, down the far side of the ridge, into the shimmering afternoon. 

*

We kept to the woods, mostly. I thought you might disdain people now even more than you once did, but I didn’t ask. The silence stretched thick as hot glass between us: I didn’t want to push too hard, burn either one of us, leave a fingerprint I could never erase. 

If my pace annoyed you, you didn’t show it. It annoyed the shit out of me. I had to stop what felt like every mile. We crossed creeks and cutaway meadows and the county line, marked with a blue metal sign you tapped with your hand apparently just for the sound.

At one point I stopped you from refilling your canteen in a stream. 

“Water’s probably not safe,” I said. 

“Not safe?” you repeatedly scornfully. “Why would it not be? Who would poison it?”

“Not poison, runoff,” I said. “Well, a kind of poison, but not intentional. It’s from the farms, the chemicals they use. Other stuff.” The Freeman farm was certified organic; Lucretia had opinions. I’d learned more than I’d intended, though much less than _she’d_ intended.

You gave me a flat look. “Why would farmers poison their own fields?”

Five hundred years. It was too much time for anyone, especially for us, and yet it also seemed too little time to hold so much change without bursting at the seams. Hell, maybe it had. You’d gone under in a world more or less like the ones we’d been born in—each inch alive and intent, not just an object to be boxed or bought or bordered. I’d made it to this plastic age against my will and I had no interest in charting that course for you, not yet. 

“Just trust me,” I said. “We’ll get water somewhere else.”

*

At a convenience store down the road I refilled your canteen in the bathroom sink and bought some shit to get the clerk’s evil eye off my back. As I stepped outside, my phone buzzed: Lu, worried.

_Hello are you doing alright?_

I handed you the drink I’d grabbed you, some chocolate monstrosity that seemed oversweet enough for your taste, and pitched the canteen in the grass beside me so I could text back. 

_ok just walking. wont be back tonight,_ I typed, slowly. And then: _its fine dont worry. sorry_

I _was_ sorry, and annoyed to be. Being worried over felt like wearing a suit of needles. All those ties, months in the weaving—to Lu, to Huey and his girls and the neighbors and the fucking dogs. All those threads just tightening. A thousand-cuts death I wouldn’t survive, not this time. The thought made me vicious.

 _Please just let me know what’s going on_ , Lu said.

_Lucretia im not your daughter_

_Don’t act like you have to be to matter_.

“Who are you talking to?” you said. At least you knew a cellphone when you saw one. 

“Lucretia’s worried about us.” 

“She has no reason to be. She doesn’t know you, let alone me.”

“Apparently she doesn’t need to.” 

You sipped the chocolate drink, and then your face did some artless little twist of surprise: the first uncontrolled expression I’d seen since you came back. My heart twisted too. “What in every heaven is this?” you said.

“Like it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s it taste like?” 

You drank again, thoughtful. “Like if dust were a fruit.”

I laughed. “Let me try.”

You passed it over and I took a gulp.

“Fuck, that’s foul.”

“It couldn’t strip the hide from a water buffalo,” you said, using the phrase that was the closest old Cham came to identifying the proof I generally preferred my alcohol to be, “so of course you don’t like it, Andromache.”

“I am what I am,” I said complacently. 

“After all this time.”

Something guarded about your voice when you said it: a hard gray shell over a soft pulp. Or—an iron box around a woman. Somehow we’d stumbled back onto tender ground. 

“What,” I said. “Do you think you aren’t?” 

“I was not myself for a long time.” You took the drink from my hand, capped it, and stood. 

“And now?” 

I was still sitting, looking up at your silhouette listing against the daylight—listing, as if you finally felt your age. It was a long moment before you spoke again. 

“You are what you are, you say, as if you haven’t changed. But I wouldn’t have had to ask the Andromache I knew to leave well enough alone.”

That stung. “I thought leaving you alone was the problem in the first place.” 

Your jaw clenched. “Don’t you dare.”

“If I don’t, who will?” I leaned back, put my elbows in the dirt: belly up, an easy target. “You going to ditch me, get your healing from Joe and Nicky? From Booker? _Nile?_ ”

“The prospect grows more attractive by the minute.”

“They’re babies. All of them. What could they understand, huh?” 

But I’d shown my underbelly in more ways than one. You narrowed your eyes thoughtfully, then fell into a fluid, sudden crouch over me. My heart picked up. 

“What are you afraid of, Andromache?” you said softly. 

“Nothing, anymore,” I said. 

“You still think I can’t tell when you’re lying.” You pressed one finger lightly over my heart. “You’re afraid I’ll leave you. You’re afraid you’ve forgotten how to love me, and I’ll give you up in disgust and disappear. Let me reassure you. When I leave you, it won’t be because you don’t love me anymore.” 

I sat up and kissed you, one hand on the back of your head. I did it to shut us both up. I wished I’d done it last night, when it would have been only because I had missed you so much—I had missed you _so much_ , missing you was the fossil frozen in the middle of me around which every dirty year since had formed—and not because you were hurting me, because we were hurting each other. 

You kissed back, then settled on your heels and smiled. 

“Ruthless as ever, my love,” you murmured. “Perhaps you haven’t changed, after all.” 

* 

All the rest of that day you walked far enough ahead of me that I couldn’t keep pace, though not so far that I’d lose sight of you. I tried to keep pace anyway. I bit my lip raw, tasted blood as I breathed, ignored the red throb of muscles pulling too tight on my barely-unbroken bones. 

It didn’t feel like my body. It didn’t feel like my world, either, though I was more used to that.

You kept to the shoulder of a paved road, maybe for my sake. Gravel, shredded tires, trash. It was easier than picking through underbrush and uneven ground. There were few cars. I thought I saw you flinch as the first roared past you, but I could have imagined it. 

The low sun gilding the kudzu put me in mind of hanging gardens. I felt the teeth of an old longing, though it might’ve just been hunger. My phone buzzed, kept buzzing, stopped. Buzzed again. I stopped, panting, and slowly eased down against a guardrail. 

“Hi, Nile,” I said. 

“Asshole!”

“Bitch.”

“ _Shithead_.”

“Punk. Miss me that much?” 

Up ahead, you stopped to look back at me, then turned to keep walking. 

“Why the hell aren’t you answering my mom’s texts?” Nile said.

“There were more?”

“Were there—Andy, I swear to God.” 

I held the phone away from my face, squinted. There was a little red bubble around a number that did actually make me feel like kind of a shithead. 

“Tell her I’m sorry. We’ve been walking awhile, must’ve passed through some places with no signal.” 

“Okay,” Nile said. “So, about that. Where the hell are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“How the hell long you gonna be gone?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Andy, you’re still recovering from a forty-foot fall. What are you going to do if you need help, wherever the hell you are?”

You’d passed over a slight rise in the road, out of sight. I didn’t move. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going with her, Nile. You understand that.” 

She sighed. “If I had Booker trace your GPS so I could send Huey to come pick you up, you wouldn’t go with him, would you.”

“Does Huey have an iron maiden to take me away in and a small army to put me there?” 

“Andy, I’ve seen what you do to small armies.”

“Hah hah,” I said. “Used to. What I used to do.”

A silence that spun and wavered like a windchime. I watched a clutch of buzzards drift high up in the air, so high they were just specks. A fall from that height would kill me on impact, none of this pussyfoot healing shit.

“What’s she like?” Nile said quietly.

“Well, it feels like I’m talking to a stranger with my wife’s face,” I said, and then rolled my eyes at my own dramatics. Rolled them again to keep back the sting of tears. 

“She came to find you. That means something. That means a lot. There’s a lot she could have been out there doing on her own, and none of it’s good. For anyone else, but mostly for her.”

“She’s so angry, Nile.” 

“Of course she is. There’s five hundred years of grief underneath all that rage, Andy. It’s gonna take a hell of a long time to unravel it. And it ain’t all on you to do it.”

I slid off the guardrail, carefully laid myself down in the weeds on the other side. The sky wasn’t big enough here to be dizzying but I was dizzy just the same, staring up into it. 

“I was alive for more than three thousand years before I found Quỳnh,” I said, closing my eyes. “Did you know that?”

“Jesus Christ, Andy.”

“No, not yet,” I said dryly. “It was closer to four thousand, really. I’d tried to die every way you can think of. I’d been a god and loved my people and watched the centuries shred them like dry grass until nothing recognizable was left. I thought I was cursed, and then I thought there was nothing in the universe powerful enough to curse me. And then I started dreaming about her. You know what the dreams are like, just violent little flashes. But I’d never had them before, I didn’t know what they meant; I thought they were visions. I thought she was a spirit of vengeance sent to haunt me into the afterlife. I only went looking for her because I thought she’d be able to kill me, that I’d finally be able to die. And then I found her.”

“Joe said she’d given up,” Nile said softly. 

“It made me—beyond furious. She was barely more than a child. What right did she have to want to die like that, when I’d suffered so much longer?” 

Nile’s steady breathing. A rush of traffic somewhere behind her; tires in the rain. The sweat drying on my skin itched and the weeds itched. A grating dissonance: this clumsy soft body beating so insistently at my attention even though sometimes I felt I didn’t have a body at all. Like I’d spent so long longing so hard to rest that all the particles of my soul had already started the journey into the other world, leaving the rest of me behind like some translucent carapace. I thought of you grasping at your one lifeline only to see that brittle shell crumble in your hand. 

“I’m glad you found each other,” Nile said. “You told me we’re not meant to be alone.”

“When you’ve been alone as long as we have, not being alone hurts just as much.” When I opened my eyes the ordinary daylight was blinding, painful. “And now we’ve got to fucking do it all over again.” 

“Okay,” Nile said after a moment. “I can see why you maybe might not be checking your texts.” 

I snorted. “It’s your fault I even know how to text in the first place.” 

In that kind, bare-knuckled way she’d inherited from her mother, Nile said, “What do you need from me, Andy?”

A car surged past. I didn’t know whether I was invisible from the road, or if the driver saw a person sprawled in the grass and just didn’t bother stopping. 

“You’re looking after the boys? Booker?”

“You know I am.” 

“Then that’s it,” I said. “That’s all I need from you, Nile.” 

Maybe it was because I’d told her more just now than I had in all the time we’d known each other, or maybe it was because she could handle people like I could horses, but she let me get away with the lie. 

*

You were waiting for me at the end of the road, where it split into another perpendicular road that marked the edge of a farm. Corn loomed over a few white mailboxes and an old car with FOR SALE painted on its dusty back window. You sat on the trunk, idly holing the empty drink bottle with your knife. 

You didn’t ask who I’d been talking to. When you smiled it had no edge to it. 

“There you are,” you said. “Let’s go.” 

“North or south?”

“Through the field, Andromache. We’re heading west; why turn aside?” 

Once I’d lured enemy soldiers into a Virginia cornfield, and when I heard them nearing, I turned back and killed the men and settled their horses, thinking what a stroke of luck that was—ten good horses—only to come out of the corn and find no one on the battlefield left alive to ride them. 

“Andromache?”

“Cornstalks cut you when you run through them,” I said. 

“So we won’t run.”

You’d made up your mind. I was too tired to argue. 

We walked down parallel rows, flashing shards of our faces at each other through the stalks. The bedsheets on the line all over again. I wondered if this was what you needed, after so long seeing nothing but the deep black: to see things only in pieces, to not be overcome. 

Wind in the husks and tassels, sweet air, the light thawing. Now and then you hummed little wisps of songs I didn’t recognize, if they were songs at all. I thought about you. I thought about Achilles, Lykon, Booker. A murmur of starlings lit up from the field and flexed above us, curling, full of power just as they’d always been, though I was no more able to read them than I had been when I was young. I was a warrior, not a seer. 

When it grew dark we ate food you’d taken from Lucretia: chips and fruit leather, some of the ham. You started to make a fire and I stopped you. We curled up back to back in the furrow between two rows and slept, or pretended to. It was cold as shit and I hurt everywhere. I half-dreamed of the farmers coming to find us, nooses in their hands, and then you turned over and curved alongside me, folded one arm under mine. The lullaby you sang was one I’d taught you.

*

Afterwards we had a string of simple, solid days one after the other, as if whatever demon still writhed between us had chosen to sleep for a while. I was sore and slow, but you kept pace with me, rubbed my bones where they ached, made me laugh. We followed roads when they were small enough, or headed in the right direction, but mostly we went overland. A grandmother paid us twenty bucks to clear the black walnuts scattered in her yard, and we drank the water she brought us with stained, fragrant hands. 

On Nile’s advice we found an Army surplus store for the gear we lacked, which you paid for with a wad of cash fished from your bag. There were enough bills in enough currencies to raise my eyebrow, though the cashier, having heard us talk in what clearly wasn’t English, didn’t seem to notice or care.

“I sold a few of the torcs from the Brest cache,” you explained to me. “A few of yours, sorry.” You weren’t sorry; the corner of your mouth dimpled, teasing. You knew I wouldn’t have been able to recognize my own torcs if my life depended on it. 

“If you had all that, why’d you let us take that money from the old woman?”

“Couldn’t you see she was too proud for charity?” 

I hadn’t seen. I’d avoided looking at her: how careful and rigid she moved, how her hands twisted. 

You’d picked up a little portable radio at the surplus, and as we walked you examined it with a gleaming kind of interest as I clumsily explained: something to do with waves in the air, or electricity, or magnets. Gray static shivered into song at the twist of your finger. I couldn’t guess what would be to your taste. You’d skip over a sinuous tawny fifties ballad that reminded me of those chansons you used to like, then hush me to absorb some glittering poppy hit that made my teeth ache. I wished for Nile, or Joe: someone who knew enough about what music was like now to give it to you deliberately, delightedly; someone who could do more than stand by and shrug.

A little less than a week after the surplus store, we found a laundromat. In your new black shirt and secondhand camos you crouched in front of the washing machine and watched it spin, inscrutable. 

“What?” I asked when I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. 

You shrugged. “We were once witches because we knew too much. What am I now that I know so little?” 

_I am not myself,_ you’d told me. I didn’t want to remind you. “There’s too much to know now and most of it’s bullshit,” I said instead. “You don’t want it.” 

“Don’t I?”

You hated being told what to do; I thought I’d taken a wrong step, that our peace couldn’t bear the weight of my clumsy, stupid words. But you let it go and hopped up to sit next to me on the row of dryers, leaning up against me a little. So we stayed there and let our asses warm up until it was time to go. 

*

It got colder. Early October, the days still mild—leagues milder than they’d been last time I was here, during the war. But at night, under a tree or in the lee of a hill, with every bone pressing through my skin like it was trying to return to the earth, it felt pretty goddamn cold. We had a nylon tent with a rainfly, we had thermal blankets and firestarters and headlamps: unthinkable luxuries. I ached anyway. I was getting old. 

The mountains fell away behind us like little wrinkles of sand. Ancient, creased with hollows and hidden places they may have been, but they were no Roof of the World, no Karakoram nor Mountains of the Moon. A day to cross a valley, two days to cross a ridge, another day for another valley; it was easier than dreaming. We were three days out of Virginia before we even realized we’d come into another state. Not that it mattered. There were no lines that could be drawn over the earth that we hadn’t already seen generations fight and fail to maintain; no animal cared for them, and neither did we. 

Autumn turned the leaves gold and orange and bloody red. I liked walking through these trees without anyone trying to kill me. One day we stopped to eat at the edge of a field, a little ribbon of stream between us and the paved road opposite. You scraped the last of the rice from the pot and gave it to me without taking your eyes off the sign across the blacktop. 

I squinted through the mist. THIS IS IT, promised the peeling red paint above an arrow pointing down. THE SHINING GROTTO. There were four or five cars in the gravel lot.

“Remember Wadi Sura?” you said. 

I did. I hadn’t been thinking of it before you spoke, but it was like your words pulled back a curtain in my mind and there it was waiting: the walls of the cave painted with beasts and hands, ochre and white and bronze and black, limbs linked, humans becoming bulls and gazelles, or unbecoming them. We’d taken refuge there once not long after we lost Lykon. Firelight rippling inside the dark. I didn’t remember why we needed refuge. But I did remember lying in your arms and telling you about the Black Fields, where the grasses are long and soft and so dark they’re almost blue, where there is no war and no winter, where the white sun shines on the felt of your home and the great horses step toward you with their eyes like stars. 

“Andromache,” you said. 

I took a bite of my rice. “I haven’t thought of that in ages.” 

“I thought of it in my prison. Often, in fact.” You cupped a handful of wet sand from the streambank and scoured the pot, shook it out, packed it away. “I wanted to remember what you told me so that if I died down there, I’d be ready to welcome you into the afterlife when you followed me. Whenever that might have been.” 

“Now it’ll be me waiting for you,” I said. I thumbed the chain out from around my neck, let the pendant you’d carved me hang swinging between us. 

“One way or another,” you said. “Though I’d just as soon give up my afterlife for yours. My people were burned and their ashes scattered from boats, to return their spirits to the water that bore them. But I’ve had enough of the sea.”

I ran my thumb over my spoon, missing the haft of an easier weapon. “You don’t speak of it,” I said quietly. “Do you think I won’t listen?” 

You shrugged. “What is there to say?” 

“I don’t know. What was it like? How did you feel? How do you feel now? What did you do, all that time between coming back and finding Booker?” _Who are you now?_ I almost said, and then I bit my tongue so hard my eyes stung.

You were looking at me as if I were the stranger.

“How could I put words to that, Andromache?” you said softly. “There is no language for it, not among all those we’ve learned and forgotten. I thought I knew pain; now I know better. What’s the point in trying to describe it?” 

You shook your head, dismissing, and then you pursed your lips to point at the sign across the road. “Shall we?”

I swallowed. Tried to shrug. “You want to?”

“Why not? I don’t know this country. What better way to learn it than from within it?”

Tickets were twenty bucks apiece. We had to leave our full packs in the cramped employee break room; the passageway was barely wide enough for the broad shoulders of our guide. He led us and a few tired tourists down into the dim, cool cave, his well-rehearsed patter already echoing off the walls. 

It wasn’t much of a cave. I’d seen caverns that could house a hundred ziggurats; I’d seen veils of stone thinner than skin, pale columns thick as stelae, lakes so still and clear a single touch would shatter them like glass. The Shining Grotto was just three narrow chambers with yellow, ruffled walls, but the tourists looked around with interest. It had been discovered in 1911, the guide said proudly: more than a hundred years ago. I glanced at you to share the joke and found you already looking slyly back at me. 

We followed along, looked politely at the dripping stone. I realized I’d wanted it to be grander. I’d wanted to come down into the earth with you and find something beautiful. 

The guide warned us to find steady footing and hold still, and then he flicked an electric switch on the wall. Darkness swallowed us. 

Absolute, unsteadying darkness. I caught my breath. Polar opposite of the Juba killbox— there, we’d drowned in light—but I tensed just the same, reaching for the labrys I no longer carried, remembered, reached instead for my knife— 

Your hand clawed at my hip. Absolute dark: like the bottom of the ocean, gods damn it to every hell. I grabbed your wrist and snapped in English, “Turn the lights back on, now!”

Strangers’ pale puzzled faces, blinking. The guide was saying something. I could hear the breath whistling between your teeth. 

I pulled you through the room, back the way we came, up the damp stairs into the gift shop and out into the gray daylight of the gravel lot. You tore away from me. My heart thudded in my throat. I grabbed your arms, pulled you close enough to press our foreheads together. Your hair everywhere, your eyes wild. 

“Look at me. Quỳnh, look at me. You’re all right.”

You closed your eyes. “I couldn’t see.”

“I know.”

“Andromache.”

“I’m right here.” 

I was. I was as close to you as I’d ever been, the closest we’d been since you came back to me, for all that we spent all our nights curled up next to each other in our little tent with the whole world outside us.

You calmed your breathing and stepped away from me. “Let’s leave.”

“Let me grab our bags. Ninety seconds, all right?”

You just jerked your chin. Your eyes scoured the cars and the split-rail fence, the slate sky, like you were looking for the hinge you could break to escape. 

I ran inside, ducked into the break room, hefted our packs with groaning shoulders. It took me a moment. And so when I came back outside, enough time had passed for three of the strangers who’d been down in the cave with us to see you in the parking lot, to see you there and cast on you a look I knew well—knew well and hated. 

It could’ve been the moments of thrilling, expensive darkness your panic robbed them of below. It could have been both of us, the way we were together. Or it could’ve been your stranger’s face, your woman’s body. It could’ve been nothing at all. 

I felt an ache start up in the back of my teeth. I strode across the gravel. They were saying something. You noticed them watching you, noticed the look on their faces. In old Cham, you invited each of them to fuck a dead pig. One of them called you the kind of word you don’t have to know to understand. It wasn’t _witch_ , this time, but it meant the same thing: _dangerous, profane, perverse._ Something to be destroyed. 

I stepped beside you, dropped our bags, rolled my shoulders. I was almost glad, almost relieved. Mostly tired. 

“Back off,” I told the strangers quietly.

“Andromache, my brave protector,” you muttered. Your tone could have smelted ore.

“What’d you say? Speaking fucking English,” the stupidest stranger said, and took a half step forward.

“Last chance,” I told him. “The hell are you even mad about? Back the fuck off.”

His friend tried to pull him back. He shook them off.

“They want a fight, they can have one,” you said. 

“ _I_ don’t want one,” I said.

“Then wait, old woman. It won’t take long.”

“Both of you talking gibberish now? Oh my god,” the stranger said. “You’re in America, so you speak _English_ . _Ennnn-glish._ Why’s that so fucking hard?”

I turned and looked at him. He was around Nile’s age. White, maybe, although I could never tell, and I didn’t care. _English._ I’d forgotten the faces of the English men who hanged us over and over and then ripped you from my arms, so it wouldn’t be fair to say this child reminded me of them. 

But even when I was a god I’d never been much for fairness. 

In English, I said to you, “Just don’t kill them,” and saw that brassy certainty in the stranger’s eyes start to buckle.

You had your knives on you, of course, but you didn’t need them. The strangers knew so little about fighting it was more work not to kill them. I once spent three meals with a monk whose life’s miracle was repairing the shell of a broken egg, every sliver and fragment sealed back in place, to restore a home for her god to dwell in it—four decades’ labor, when the egg had been shattered in a moment. 

There was a wet crack, like a branch snapping; one stranger went down howling. The second stranger was trying to run, and you let them stumble to their feet again and again before bringing them down with precise viper strikes. The third looked up from the sobbing idiot and staggered to his feet with a rock in his hand. He swung to stave your skull in, and you ducked, twisted, struck. Another howl. People were watching from the edge of the lot, some with phones raised. You weren’t even smiling. Your eyes were black and blank. I had never seen the expression on your face before, not in all our millennia.

I slid between your raised heel and the child at your feet, unbalancing you. “Enough,” I said gently, or started to say, and then I was on my back on the ground with the breath slamming from my lungs in a rush. 

On instinct I grabbed the kick coming for my ribs, yanked. We grappled in the dust—throat, elbow, belly, sternum—and then I landed a blow that stole your breath, gave me enough time to roll away to my feet.

“Quỳnh—” I panted, blood dripping from my chin. “Quỳnh—”

You flew at me. I’d lived longer, won more battles, but that meant nothing; it was all I could do to defend myself, your hits a flurry like hail. No sound but our gasps and impacts. If you drew your knives I’d be dead, if I stumbled I’d be dead, but beneath the tinny sheen of panic I felt a shard of calm growing. This was right. I knew you, and you knew me. We’d carried that first meeting in the desert with us these three thousand years and more, only for it to come back to us like this, unplanned, inevitable.

You slammed my feet out from under me and then you had me on the ground again. I felt your knife on my throat. Should I drown in my blood, as you drowned? There were worse ways to die. I knew because I’d died them, died and survived to come to this moment with you, so I could raise my hands to the sides of your burning, beloved face and wait. My love, my own savior. My perfect death.

I was sorry not to have more time with you, but that was all. The rest was dust. 

You withdrew the knife. 

“Damn you, Andromache,” you whispered, and then you hauled me to my feet, your face as hard as iron.

*

No chance the cops weren’t called: three groaning bodies on the gravel, half a dozen onlookers with their glowing little phones. We staggered off into the mist. You had to help me shrug into my pack: I couldn’t raise my left arm high enough to do it alone. 

“We need shelter,” you said, icy. “You need tending to.”

I didn’t reply. There was a chance my jaw was broken. 

“I don’t know this world anymore, Andromache, you have to help me!” 

_Damn you,_ I thought, my eyes stinging. _Damn you too._

Down the ditch beside the road, into a ragged patch of trees, trash bright in the leaf litter and plastic bags snarled on the branches. Yellow NO TRESPASSING signs stapled to every fourth tree. We went limping down a hill, along a stinking stretch of mud and shallow water, up a steep rocky shelf to the fence at the top. On the other side a neighborhood. It had started to rain in earnest. The hair that had fallen from its knot now hung wet in your face and you looked wild, half-mad, like you were crawling out of the ocean all over again. Maybe you’d never stopped. 

You left me slumped against a mossy rock and climbed the fence. Disappeared. I leaned my aching head on the cold stone. You’d wanted to kill me. I knew it; I’d seen it in your eyes. I wondered what you’d seen in mine that stopped you.

I thought of texting Joe. _You were right. I should have come home when you asked._ I’d looked at the face of the secret I was keeping from myself, and in doing so I’d made you look too: I wanted to die. Still. Always. With or without you. 

Time slipped around me. When you came back, a minute later or an hour or longer, you had to shake me awake, although I hadn’t really been dreaming. You’d found a house: the family gone, four walls and roof like an empty shell behind them, a light left on in the kitchen to give the illusion of presence, of safety. 

We crept along the trees inside the fence until we had to toss our packs over and climb it; the effort made me nauseous. Dusk was seeping down into the air. A backyard full of children’s toys: a weathered purple slide, a dirty soccer ball, a small tricycle with tangled tassels. We slipped inside. The air smelled stale. 

A bowl of water and kitchen towels you cut into strips for bandages: this was the extent of your doctoring. Lykon had cared for medicine as he cared for all learning, and Nicky was a skilled nurse, but you and I had gone so long not needing healing we’d lost all skill for it. What little we’d ever had. 

You prodded my jaw, my cheek. “Nothing’s broken.”

“Quynh.” 

“Be quiet, Andromache.” 

I let you clean the blood from my face. Then I took the rag from you, folded over a fresh side, and cleaned the blood from your knuckles, where the skin was already smooth and whole again. 

Crow-black bruises spread on my shoulders, my forearms and thighs; some had hard knots of blood in the center. Nothing was broken. I was just tired.

When you finished wrapping my wrist you dropped my hand like it burned. The dim yellow glow of the kitchen light didn’t reach you; you were just a dark shape in the darkness, indistinct, though you were so close to me I could touch.

“Why didn’t you do it,” I said. 

“How dare you ask me that,” you said, so quiet with rage I could hardly hear you. 

“Why?” I insisted. “You wanted to, I saw—”

“You stupid, selfish ox,” you hissed. “I may be half of your life, but you are all of mine. I didn’t batter my way out of hell to give you the satisfaction of an easy death, no matter how much I want to!”

For a long moment there was nothing but the sound of our ragged breathing. I found the curve of your cheek, cupped it. 

“I would have suffered underwater for four thousand years to spare you suffering it even once.”

“We’re not underwater, Andromache,” you said. “I don’t need you to die for me anymore.” 

You pulled my hand from your face and folded it back over my chest, as if I were a corpse. 

My mouth was ash; my eyes burned. I couldn’t answer. And then the silence became an answer. 

I watched you put the room back to rights, as if we’d never touched it. I watched you gather your pack, tie back your hair, and turn to leave.

“How long?” I croaked. 

You looked back at me from the door. “You don’t get to know how long,” you said, and then you left. 

Nile found you a few days later, in a diner in Memphis, and afterward she called me.

“She told me I reminded her of you, only funnier,” Nile said. “I told her she ought to be grateful I was sitting across from her eating blueberry pancakes instead of trying to beat the shit out of her in the parking lot.”

“Defending my honor?”

“Someone has to.” Her face was tiny and blurred on my cracked phone screen. “She said you stopped fighting. You wanted her to kill you.”

I let the phone fall flat on the motel table, giving Nile an excellent view of the heavy pilled curtains and the popcorn ceiling. 

“You already knew about that,” I said.

“Mom said you were doing better for a little while, on the farm.”

“Well shit,” I said, “seems like everybody’s got something to say about me. What about you, Nile? Tell me how to fix what’s wrong with me, go on.” 

I watched dust motes spin in the wheeze of air coming out of the window unit until I couldn’t bear it any longer and looked at Nile’s warm, drawn face on the screen.

“I didn’t know you two back in the old days,” she said, “and, I mean, I hardly know either one of you now, but I love you, Andy. I want you to actually make it to the end of your life. She’s part of that. I just want you two to figure out a way of talking that doesn’t involve blood or strangers in the hospital.”

“You give her the phone?”

“Yeah, I gave her the phone, showed her how to use it, made sure all our numbers are in there. She took some really good pictures of her pancakes.”

“You think she’ll use it?”

“Hell if I know, but I hope she at least keeps it,” Nile said. “It took us four days and an ex-CIA agent to find her this time, but even you can track a phone with its location on. It’d be nice if something about this was easy.”

I tilted the phone back so Nile could see me. Because she was Lucretia’s daughter, she didn’t say anything about my red eyes.

“She’s not going to wait for me, is she,” I said. 

Nile touched her screen kindly, as if it were my shoulder. “You can go back to the farm if you want,” she offered softly. “Let me keep talking to her. Hell, bring in Joe and Nicky; they miss her too, and she actually knows them. Maybe we let her take out some of her anger on people who are a little more durable and then you two can try again.” 

“That plan might have worked if we had a few decades to let her cool down, but I can’t wait that long,” I said. “I’m going after her.” 

“I could come with you.”

“I’m not going to drive off a cliff or anything.”

“Nah, I’m not worried about that. There’s only one way you’d let yourself go out, and she’s got an 800-mile head start.” 

“I wouldn’t wish our curse on anybody,” I said abruptly. “But I wish I’d known you longer.”

“Andy, you’re gonna know me for a long while yet.”

“I know. But what’s fifty years? Barely a raindrop.” I flicked my fingers to demonstrate: poof, gone. “You’ll have to look out for her. All of you. Once I’m gone.”

Nile looked at me for a long moment. She had new braids; they swayed against her face, gold charms flashing. 

“You know, I’m almost going to miss her dreams, now we’ve met,” Nile said. “Not the drowning dreams, those were terrible. But when she dreams about you...man, those are something else.”

*

I bought an old car from a guy selling it off his lawn. When I handed him the cash he tugged it a little to get my attention, and then nodded at the bruises on my face.

“You running away from someone?” he said.

“Other way around,” I said, and left before he could figure out what that meant. 

You weren’t walking anymore: I watched your little blue dot move across the map at an odd lurching pace. Hitchhiking? By the time I reached Memphis, you were still a day ahead of me.

I slept in the car in a WalMart parking lot. I kept the radio on, listening for something. Didn’t really know what. Your voice? A song I could recognize? It was mostly commercials and static. 

In my dream Achilles told me to leave him, only instead of the front porch of the cabin we’d built in the bush, he was standing in a field of grass that rippled as high as his head. The white of his wild beard gleamed, a beacon in the dark. There were other people in the grass behind him, dozens, but I couldn’t see well enough to recognize them. 

* 

My phone buzzed somewhere in the middle of Arkansas. You’d sent me a picture of a wind farm. No comment: just the huge eerie blades turning above a field gauzy with mist. 

I didn’t know how to answer. I sent a picture of the fields rumpled to either side of me, snow stained with sun and cloudshadow. 

A few miles down the road my phone buzzed again: another picture, one apparently taken from the top of a windmill, of a single enormous blade blurred in the foreground while a row of others marched down the plain, limbs all out of time with each other. 

_they remind me of votives,_ I texted. _they just need eyes_

The rest of the day: silence.

* 

I was too old to be sleeping in cars. I was also too old, and too beat up, to be driving so long in the first place. But when it came to exhausting yourself enough to sand your thoughts away like rust, there was nothing better than hours on a highway to make you feel like you were peeling time away from yourself in huge sunburnt strips. 

With the curtains closed the motel room was utterly dark. I dreamed I was dead, and my kin were folding my hands around my flint dagger and arranging the horses’ ochre-bedded skulls in their bowls around me. I laid waiting for the horses to lead me through the earth to the other side, where the felt houses circle in the Black Fields, except my grave never opened. I couldn’t move.

I woke gasping, tears dripping cold down my temples into my ears. I reached for a lamp, but my hand found the phone first. Suddenly I thought of something I wanted more than light.

You answered. For a long moment of ringing I thought you might not. But as I told you my dream, you heard me out in silence so close I could hear the buzz of your breath.

After a long time, you said, “Nothing helps. But you should try to move; take big strides, deep breaths. To remember that you can.”

You hung up before I could reply.

* 

Oklahoma. Texas. We were less than an hour apart outside one dusty town, the land flat as beaten copper. I pumped gas in the bitter wind and sent Lucretia a picture of the bright blue pump, which looked older than she was. The delay cost me. The highway rang so empty I imagined every metal flash in the distance must be you, until I realized that you’d taken a narrow road north while I barrelled west, and I had to turn around.

You sent a picture of a thundercloud, purple and swollen yet so distant it seemed smooth as old leather. Forty minutes after that: the cloud far behind you, ridged with figures and shadows like the face of a temple. 

The rain you avoided hit me instead, bad enough I pulled off the road and killed the engine. Half an hour inside a waterfall: headlights careening into a dark wall of water, the roar of it on the roof. I took a video of the silver sheets of rain for you. 

_like the hymns at takshashila,_ you wrote back. I’d almost forgotten: the great chorus that sang in the center of the valley, all their thousand voices starting in the same droning note until they broke by the dozens into harmony after harmony, like a diamond faceting in real time. 

_i’d forgotten,_ I said.

 _i haven’t,_ you said.

*

Then you stopped moving altogether. Over the course of one long morning, I caught up to you, and then there you were: camped under the single tree visible in the entire horizon, two horses grazing nearby. 

I parked on the shoulder and stepped out of the car. 

You had a pallet of blankets to keep you off the November ground, and an enormous pink hat to keep the mild sun from your face. As I approached, the horses looked up. The chestnut went back to grazing, her curiosity satisfied, but the gray kept watching with interest.

I came close, offered my fist. The mare huffed, nostrils flared, and eyed me as I turned aside. “You’re friendly, hmm?” I murmured. 

“That’s Campos,” you said. “The other’s Fancy.”

“You steal them?”

“Liberated them. Long story.”

“I leave you alone for a week, and you liberate a pair of horses.”

“Technically it was a herd. But you and I only need two.”

Campos lipped at my pockets and, finding nothing, nudged me out of the way of a patch of clover. 

“I missed you,” I said, because I was tired of pretending. 

“I’m sorry,” you said.

“I’m all right.”

“You’re not.” You were peering out from the brim of your hat. It had a silk flower on the band. You raised your hand, and I crouched to be close enough for you to trace the bruises you’d given me. “You didn’t fight back. You always fight back.”

I looked down. I sat on the blanket where you’d left a space for me. 

“Do you know why I’m angry at you, Andromache?” you said quietly.

“I couldn’t find you. I left you.”

“But not without reason. Any death might be our last: Lykon taught us that. Should you have risked dying, or leading Niccolò and Yusuf to their deaths, for my sake alone?”

“Yes,” I said. 

“No,” you said. “No, I’m angry because I wanted to kill you. I wanted to put you in a box and sink you, so that you’d know what it was like without me having to tell you. I longed for it. In the very moment I crawled onto that sand alone, I wanted the same for you. And then Booker told me you’re mortal.” You sat up, brushed dust from your coat. “It haunts me that there’s so much of me you don’t know anymore. Four hundred and ninety-two years. Can you imagine lying there, drowning, going mad, wondering if I’d left you? Can you? Even if you can it will never be enough.”

“Quỳnh,” I whispered.

“Other people have returned from prison to an unfamiliar world,” you said. “Other people have suffered terribly and survived, or have been abandoned by lovers. But no one in the world has ever known the pain I knew. And now no one ever will.”

Understanding struck—like being in the desert again, when I first saw you and realized that you and I are the same. 

“You realized you’re alone,” I murmured. 

Your face crumpled. 

“When I saw your face in that parking lot—when I saw you decide—” you pressed your face into your hands, your voice thick with grief. “I barely survived five centuries alone. I have never, ever understood how you did it for forty. Andromache, I am terrified of losing you. I am terrified of becoming you.”

“You won’t,” I said.

“You can’t promise that.”

“I do anyway.” 

I wrapped my arms around you; you seized me back tight, weeping. 

“You’ll have Joe and Nicky. Booker. Nile,” I murmured. “You won’t be alone in your grief, just as you aren’t alone in your love. And I’ll have my felt house in the Black Fields, and one day, I’ll welcome you into it. That’s more than I could’ve hoped for, Quỳnh. That’s more than enough.”

It was true as I said it. It had to be, because I don’t lie to you. I needed you to help me make it true. We’d build it out of dust if we needed to.

I was crying too, and my arms hurt. I laid us down and pulled the blankets around us. Your body against me, like time itself pressed down red-hot into a shape I could hold.

“I want to see the ocean again,” you said, and pressed your face into my throat.

Pale sunlight fell on the leaves above us. I stared up into it and loved you. 

“We could take our time,” I murmured. “Stretch it out if we wanted. Make camp all winter, head west in the spring, reach the coast by early summer.”

You leaned up on one elbow to look at me, your wet face glimmering, a sly tug to the corner of your mouth. “Could you handle that, old woman?”

“Oh, sure. I’m not dying for a long, long time. At least a year, if I can help it.”

“Oh, a whole year without dying?” you said, kissing me. “All right. That’s good enough to start with.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[ART] A Year Without Dying](https://archiveofourown.org/works/30026481) by [DYlogger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DYlogger/pseuds/DYlogger)




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